Hard-right groups wary of Steve Stockman bid

The insurgent conservative groups that have thwarted the GOP establishment in a string of bloody primaries since 2010 appear to be drawing a line for themselves in Texas.

There, bomb-throwing Rep. Steve Stockman filed papers at the last minute Monday to challenge John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the U.S. Senate. On the surface, the race looks like a classic duel between a powerful Washington insider and a scrappy tea party outsider — in a sense, it’s an almost cartoonishly exaggerated version of the dynamic that has divided the GOP for years now.

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But already, some of the country’s most prominent conservative organizations have signaled that Stockman will likely have to go it alone against Cornyn. With less than three months until primary day and only $32,000 in Stockman’s campaign account (Cornyn has nearly $7 million on hand), several top conservative strategists privately suggested the race was a fool’s errand – or, more kindly, a quixotic effort that Stockman is welcome to pursue on his own.

It would be harder to find a candidate who more fully embodies the official GOP than Cornyn, a former judge and state attorney general who spent two election cycles tangling with activists as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Stockman, meanwhile, could pass for a right-wing congressman on an Aaron Sorkin show: He is an unabashed provocateur who raffled off a Bushmaster assault rifle during this year’s gun control debate and once said that the great thing about planet Earth is that “if you poke holes in it oil and gas come out.”

In an 1,100-word campaign manifesto released Tuesday, Stockman called himself “the most fearless conservative in Congress” and warned conservative supporters that “liberal John Cornyn” was seeking to put a “Republican bayonet in your back.”

Not a single outside group said Stockman gave them a heads up on his plans to run for the Senate. The chairman of the Texas Republican Party said he, too, was blindsided. Ambushed by Stockman’s announcement, the powerful Club for Growth swiftly disavowed any interest in the primary. Several other tea party-friendly groups did not entirely rule out engaging in the election, but played down the possibility and acknowledged up front that Stockman’s campaign looks like a questionable proposition.

“While Congressman Stockman has a pro-economic growth record, so does Senator Cornyn,” Club for Growth president Chris Chocola said in a statement, noting that the Club decides its endorsements based on both the incumbent’s record and the challenger’s viability. “None of those factors weigh against Senator Cornyn, so we do not expect to be involved in the Texas race.”

Daniel Horowitz of the conservative Madison Project, a group that has endorsed the primary challenger to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, said activist concerns about Cornyn’s record were running up against the limitations of a late-starting Texas campaign.

“Stockman definitely is conservative, not just in votes but in voice,” Horowitz wrote in an email. “However, because this whole thing took us by surprise, we haven’t met with him or assessed him as a potential Senate candidate.” Horowitz added that “it would be hard to find enough money to run statewide in just three months.”

Activists in Texas also took a jaundiced view of Stockman’s odds. Many tea party types were furious with Cornyn this fall when he broke with the state’s junior senator, Ted Cruz, over an Obamacare defunding measure ahead of the government shutdown, and were desperate for a credible challenger. But while Stockman is a known quantity in some conservative circles, especially among gun-rights groups, he has limited visibility with the general public and even among tea party activists.